The
annual gun deer hunting season in Wisconsin begins tomorrow, the long tradition of a
regulated hunt in the state dates back to 1851. The modern season brings with it new
challenges and opportunities for the thousands of hunters descending into the outdoors with
high hopes for the harvest. Jeff Pristle is longtime deer program specialist with the
Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and he joins us now and Jeff thanks a lot for being
here. Happy to be here. It's the day of anticipation. Correct. So with the gun deer season starting
tomorrow, how many licenses have been sold as a measure of interest this year and how does that
compare historically? Yeah, well interest, we're right on about the same pace as we've been the
past couple of years or within a half a percent. So we'll be somewhere just shy of 600,000 deer
hunters out on Saturday morning. Historically, Wisconsin peaked at 700,000 at the turn of the
century 25 years ago. So we've seen a decline that's really driven just by the demographics of
our of our hunting population, but it's it's kind of stabilized the last couple of years,
which is a good thing. Yeah, those numbers don't sound bad. The estimate is that there are two
million deer walking around out there. What do conditions this year look like for hunters to
be able to harvest them? Well, the things that are in hunters favor this year are we're going to
have relatively cool and calm conditions. We'd love, oh, we're not going to have that at least
at the beginning of the season. Agricultural harvest, especially corn harvest is add or ahead of
schedule. And so that's good in the farmland. And we're coming off of two mild winters. So that
means the deer population in the Northern forest is trending up a little bit. The things that are
stacked against us are that it's relatively late opener on the calendar. So the later we get into
November with the opener, we do see a little reduct in daytime deer movement. And so that could
work against us this weekend, but that's just part of the nature of hunting. What are the
regions in Wisconsin that look more favorable for hunters? Well, I always think that's in the
eye of the beholder because not all hunters are looking for the same for the best chance to see
deer and harvest deer. You know, the counties in the state that perennially have the highest
harvest densities are counties like Wapaca and Marquette Green Lake at the east central part
of the state. We saw 13 counties in mostly in east central Wisconsin have a record buck kill
last year. And there probably couldn't be in that same area this year. But if hunters that are
looking for a different kind of experience, maybe a little more solitude and a lot of country to
explore, you know, the Northern forest, you know, offers that in spades with big, big chunks of state
and federal properties. That's where I'll be this weekend looking forward to that kind of an
experience. I may not see as many deer, but that's not everyone's primary objective. So how do recent
harvest of between three and 350,000 across all deer seasons compare? We've actually been in a
pretty stable pattern really over the past decade. Isn't that like you said 300, 350,000? And it kind
of undulates up and down driven mostly by antlerless deer harvest on the buck harvest has been pretty
stable. And considering we've been seeing a slight decline in hunter numbers that that stability of
harvest means that that more hunters are being successful. But it's certainly hunters that
remember 20 years ago where we were in kind of a bulb of really high deer numbers and high hunter
numbers. Remember those harvests where we were getting between 400,000 deer and then that peak,
we got as many as 600,000 deer. But that was driven by really high antlerless harvests,
which we're not seeing these days. And so it's we've had quite a bit of actual pretty stable
conditions other than the minor fluctuations with weather and stuff in recent years.
What would be the option optimal harvest to manage the deer population?
In Wisconsin, yeah, there's two different stories going on always with that northern forest versus
the farmland. And the northern forest is kind of driven by by by weather and things that we don't
necessarily have control over and we may turn the antlerless harvest down, you know, after severe
winters and up after mild winters this year, but in the in the agricultural part of the state,
that's where the real challenge lies because optimally, we should be harvesting about two
antlerless deer for every buck. And that just doesn't happen voluntarily. We've accomplished
that in the past with mandatory antlerless harvest, but we tend without some type of incentive or
mandatory. We tend to get them harvested at about one to one ratio. We really need to have that
antlerless harvest at about 1.5. I have to choose per buck in those farmland counties.
You speak about hunters considering being a hunter for the community, not just for
themselves or individually. Well, what do you mean by that?
Back to what we were just talking about in that those hunters that find themselves
fortunate in the positions where they have access to deer. The challenge that we have is
once a Wisconsin deer hunter gets a deer, hasn't been the freezer, they're incentive to take
another deer goes way down. So even though we provide that opportunity, they're not necessarily
incentivized to harvest an adequate number of deer in the places where we really have the
opportunity to do so. So those hunters hopefully would be able to say, I can take an extra deer
and there's instances that it can be put to use through our formal deer donation program.
But there's a lot of other side benefits to managing the deer population, both ecologically and
within the tolerances of human social tolerances, relates to car accidents and crop damage and all
those types of things. And so this, you know, hunters for eons actually were a subset of the
population that hunted for their community as a whole. We've kind of moved culturally towards a
being being old. And it's, it's, I think, behovers to recapture that notion that we're
hunters for the community so that the greater community sees us as an asset to them.
What do you want hunters to be on the lookout for in terms of chronic wasting disease?
Well, it's important for us to keep a good tab on how that disease is evolving in the state,
both in terms of its rate of on the landscape and the prevalence within the areas. We're
gathering really good information that not only helps us make better decisions in the future
within Wisconsin, but other states are really learning from what we're capturing here in
Wisconsin because the disease is not going away. But we can, there are steps we can take to mitigate
its spread and work within having it on the landscape. So really our focus is on that leading edge
where the disease is spreading in the state really kind of across the middle of the state. We
encourage hunters statewide to get their deer sampled. And we've developed a good cohort of
what I would call citizen science hunters that that Duke participate every year and contribute
to that that database better decision making. How difficult is deer management in the state
with waning numbers of hunters and changing conditions out there?
It isn't real challenge in as much as we're talking about, you know, numbers, but the part
of the challenge is that a lot of these deer exist in areas that are not accessible to the
deer hunters. And the hunters would say, we'd love to help out with managing the deer population.
We just don't have access to deer. So for landowners that recognize, hey, there's probably too many
deer in this landscape. They have a role to play with maybe providing that access. And the other
thing to be aware of is this is not unique to Wisconsin. Most of the Midwest states are seeing
the same challenge in the Eastern states. And so at having a discussion about a paradigm shift
towards, you know, enhancing harvest as it relates to, again, making the hunting community an asset
to the total community. We leave it there, Jeff Pristle. Thanks very much for joining us.
You bet. Good luck to all the hunters.
On this and other issues facing Wisconsin, visit our website at pbswisconsin.org and then
click on the news tab. That's our program for tonight. I'm Frederica Freiberg. Have a good weekend.